Thunder has work to do after losing to Spurs, but OKC doesn't have to burn everything down
· Yahoo Sports
The chant started in the upper reaches of Paycom Center during a timeout late in the fourth quarter, and with the harsh reality of the situation hitting Thunder fans and taking their volume from jet engine to public library, the chorus quickly filtered across the arena.
Go, Spurs, go!
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Go, Spurs, go!
Thunder fans tried to fight it, countering with their own chant — O-K-C! O-K-C! — but amid their growing playoff dread, they never quite drowned out the Spurs.
Much like the Thunder itself.
“They were just the better team tonight, start to finish,” Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. “Then every time we tried to cut into it, take control of the game, it felt like they had an answer.”
On a night the Thunder had a chance to clinch the Western Conference finals on home court and return to the NBA Finals to defend its title, it instead watched as the Spurs celebrated a Game 7 win on home hardwood. They wore the NBA Finals shirts this time. They got the trophies and the hats and fun.
And with alien-being Victor Wembanyama leading this young but supremely talented team, the Spurs have quickly emerged as a roadblock every would-be champion in the NBA is going to have to contend with for years to come.
Including the Thunder, which is young and supremely talented in its own right.
But after losing this series to the Spurs, the Thunder is unlike most of the teams in the league. It doesn’t have to guess how it stacks up; it knows. Oklahoma City lost eight of the dozen games it played against San Antonio this season.
Winning every third game against the Spurs won’t cut it.
The Thunder knows what a monster the Spurs have already become.
“It’s one thing for them to emerge as the team that they did this season,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said, “but they continued to get better throughout the season and stay hungry throughout the season.
“That’s a testament to Mitch (Johnson, Spurs coach), the staff and the team.”
A testament, yes, but a problem, too.
So, what is the Thunder going to do about its Spurs problem?
First and foremost, don’t blow up the roster. Or burn it down. Or make any other knee-jerk disruptive decisions.
Yes, the Spurs exposed shortcomings in the Thunder’s roster. Chet Holmgren was largely a non-factor throughout the entire series — an All-Star and third-team All-NBA player who only took two shots in Game 7??? — while Lu Dort, so effective defensively against so many players, struggled to find favorable matchups. Isaiah Joe and Aaron Wiggins fell out of the rotation almost completely, even as the Thunder found itself without Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell.
More on that in a minute.
Some of those guys may be on their way out of Oklahoma City this offseason. I could see Joe and Wiggins moved. Same as Dort, though I hope I’m dead wrong about that because of his overall value and body of work.
Then again, maybe I need to take a page out of SGA’s playbook when he was asked Saturday night what role he might play in some of the team’s business decisions, including team options on Dort and Isaiah Hartenstein.
“I will give zero input,” he said. “I will let Sam Presti, the greatest GM ever, do his job.”
Presti, of course, will tinker because that’s what he does. He’s never stood still. He’s refused to let his team get stagnant.
No reason to think he’d start doing that now.
But Presti doesn’t need to hit the panic button either — the Thunder almost beat the Spurs with its best player struggling mightily during several stretches of the series, its second-best player almost no-showing a majority of the games and its third- and fourth-best players spending most of the series on the bench in street clothes.
In addition to SGA’s bad stretches and Chet’s disappearing act, Williams with his hamstring injury and Mitchell with his calf one were both out for the second half of the series.
Sure, Dub gave it a go in Game 6, and tip of the cap to him for trying, but it was obvious he wasn’t ready.
Taking those two guys off the floor for the Thunder would be like the Spurs losing Julian Champagnie and De’Aaron Fox for over half of the series. Think things might’ve looked a little different had San Antonio not had Champagnie raining threes or Fox zipping to the rim?
Of course it would’ve.
“I’m not going to speculate on what could have been; that’s fantasy land,” Thunder veteran Alex Caruso said after Game 7. “We had a chance to win the game tonight. Credit to them. They showed up. They’re a well-coached team. They won the game. We’ll never know, and I’m not going to waste my time thinking about it.”
Think about it or not, there was a black-diamond degree of difficulty for the Thunder to beat the Spurs without Williams and Mitchell.
That’s not speculation.
That’s truth.
“We have not been an excuse team ever, and we’re not going to start now,” Daigneault said when I asked him how much the Williams and Mitchell injuries affected the series.
“We had enough to win.”
And therein lies the heart of the matter. The Thunder did have enough to win, and that speaks to the talent on the roster, the depth on the bench and the culture in the locker room.
It’s why you saw Cason Wallace go off for 14 points in the fourth quarter Saturday and almost single-handedly give the Thunder a chance to win the series. Why you saw Jared McCain go from trade-deadline headscratcher (doesn’t the Thunder already have enough guards?!?) to a huge playoff contributor. Why you saw Caruso continue to do Caruso things in the playoffs.
Some people might be surprised that the Thunder lost to the Spurs, but considering the pieces that were unavailable or that went missing, the real surprise is in how close the series was.
It would’ve been easy for Thunder to fold, but it pushed the series and the Spurs to the limit.
“I’m so impressed by this group,” SGA said. “Not to give any excuses — they’re a really good team over there — but losing Ajay and Dub the way we did in the series, you would think it would be a lot harder for us. But those guys never got discouraged, played their butts off, and the reason why we got to this point in this series is because the supporting cast was amazing.”
Parts of Gilgeous-Alexander’s postgame press conference were punctuated by shouts and cheers in the hallway outside. As the Spurs left the on-court ceremony and filtered toward their locker room, the celebration was as lively. Much like the San Antonio fans’ chant, the joy was not drowned out.
Neither were the Spurs.
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at [email protected]. Like her at facebook.com/JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at @jennicarlsonok.bsky.social and twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: SGA 'will give zero input' to Sam Presti on Thunder offseason moves